John Hayes: I give way to the hon. Lady. I was going to come to invasive speeches in a moment, but she has pre-empted me.

John Hayes: As the hon. Lady suggests, the kind of future that I anticipate is very different from the one that she sees, for my kind of future is ambitious for Britain and virtuous in its intent; I am not sure that that is true of hers. I do not mean to be unkind in any way. However, as I said, I will come to invasive speeches by those who are apparently ornamental when they first arrive but turn out to be nothing but a nuisance.
	Hon. Members will see a virtuous pattern that demonstrates my and the Government’s unrelenting commitment to delivering better infrastructure. At the heart of the autumn statement made by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor last week was the biggest and most far-reaching roads programme in decades, with over 100 improvements to our major roads. As the House knows, that extra capacity will be underpinned by £15 billion of investment. Better infrastructure means more jobs, more opportunities and more growth. Those things will ultimately help to build a better future, drive down the deficit and inspire our people.
	On taking office, we produced the first ever national infrastructure plan. We have made big calls on HS2, on Crossrail—the biggest construction project in Europe—and on shale gas exploration. We have got Britain building, with over 500,000 new homes built since April 2010.

John Hayes: The hon. Gentleman will be familiar with the impact assessment. I have a copy here and I would be happy to let him read it. It is available and if he looks at that impact assessment he will be able to gauge how far we have performed the analysis he describes. If he feels that we have done so insufficiently, I shall be more than happy to correspond with him directly on the matter. I know that he always brings fresh thinking to the consideration of this House.
	The Bill will enable communities to be offered the chance to buy a stake in new, commercial renewable electricity schemes in their local area, so that they can gain a greater share in the associated financial benefit. We would consider using this power only if the voluntary approach to community shared ownership in renewable energy did not bear fruit. A right to buy would give communities the opportunity to have a real stake and sense of ownership in projects happening in their area. The Shared Ownership Taskforce recently launched its voluntary framework, and we brought forward an amendment to the Bill in the other place in order to provide greater certainty on the minimum time scales for this voluntary approach to take effect. We are proposing, too, to allow changes to the renewable heat initiative to provide more flexibility in financing arrangements for renewable heating systems.
	Let me come on now to what I described as the exciting part of my speech, which deals with the Wood review. We recognise that increasing renewable energy sources is important, but we realise that a dynamic and
	flourishing oil and gas industry remains important, too. It can contribute to our energy security and to the economy, supporting around 450,000 jobs and showing record capital expenditure in 2013 of around £14 billion.
	The Government agreed with the findings of Sir Ian Wood’s independent report, which concluded that changes to the recovery and stewardship regime in the North sea could deliver around £200 billion of additional value to the UK economy. We intend to deliver all of Sir Ian’s recommendations, but further work is required with stakeholders on a number of detailed aspects and parliamentary time is scarce. We are therefore starting by introducing two measures: one will put into statute the principle of maximising economic recovery of petroleum from UK waters; and the second will introduce a power so that the costs of funding a larger, better resourced regulator can be paid for by the industry rather than through general taxation, as is currently the case.
	We need to explore all our energy options. This is the age of increasing costs, uncertainty and insecurity in overseas energy suppliers. The shale gas industry in the UK is at an embryonic stage, and the changes in the Bill would simplify the procedure by which onshore gas and oil and deep geothermal developers can obtain underground drilling access, and are accompanied by the industry’s commitment to pay communities in return for the right to use deep-level land. We do not yet know what is commercially viable, but we are encouraging exploration. These provisions will help us address this question to ensure that the regulation is compatible with these new methods of underground drilling.
	There has been a great deal of unfounded scaremongering on the environmental impacts of shale gas, much of it based on examples from other jurisdictions. The Bill does not alter the involvement of local authority planners; nor does it erode in any way the strength of our regulatory regime, the effectiveness of which has been demonstrated over 50 years of development, which is one of the strictest and safest in the world.

Richard Burden: I thank the Minister for those few brief words of introduction to the Bill, and I look forward to debating its contents with him. If he will forgive me, I will not quote Disraeli quite so extensively as he did. I might not even quote “Alice in Wonderland” quite so extensively, although he might like to think about his own party’s performance as I remind him of another quote from the book, in which a character says that when he uses a word,
	“it means just what I choose it to mean”.
	That seems to typify the Government’s flip-flopping on infrastructure up to now.
	The Minister has heard criticism from Opposition Members today. Interestingly, he has also heard some veiled criticism of his predecessors from those on the Government Benches, which surprised many of us. Perhaps that shows that infrastructure policy was not really in shape until he came along. Also, I could not help but notice that he kept referring to “my Department”. The Secretary of State for Transport, who is sitting alongside him, might need to be a bit careful about who is after his job.
	This is a complex and wide-ranging Bill. It contains extensive provisions covering a whole range of Departments, which is why I am pleased to be joined on the Opposition Front Bench today by the shadow Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Barnsley East (Michael Dugher), as well as by my hon. Friends the Members for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Tom Greatrex) and for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods). The Library briefing on the Bill describes it as a “portmanteau” Bill, and we are pleased to welcome the Minister and his portmanteau to the House today.
	The Bill comes nowhere near to meeting the challenges faced by transport, energy and housing, despite all that the Minister has said today. There is cross-party consensus on the importance of infrastructure to our economy. Economic and population growth and the need to decarbonise our economy will all add further strain to an infrastructure that is already creaking. There seem to be different views about that. I imagine that, while we might disagree on a number of aspects of the Bill, hon. Members on both sides of the House will have raised an eyebrow on hearing the leader of UKIP explaining that the problems with infrastructure were all down to immigration, but I guess that that is a matter for him.
	The Minister said that the Bill proved the Government’s commitment to investing in infrastructure. We have heard a lot of talk from the Government on infrastructure
	over the past week or so. We have heard the re-announcement of a £15 billion road programme—two thirds of which, surprisingly, has been earmarked for coalition Members’ constituencies—yet this is happening after the Government scrapped £4 billion-worth of strategic roads investment on entering office. We have also heard another garden city announcement, yet Ministers have presided over the lowest peacetime level of house building since the 1920s. And we have had yet another infrastructure plan update, promising yet more schemes, when the reality is that less that a fifth of the projects are in construction and infrastructure output is down more than 10% since 2010.
	Let me give the House an example of one of the supposed achievements of the plan that the Government have published. The Dartford crossing is a major bottleneck, with serious congestion. One of the achievements of the Government’s infrastructure plan is—wait for it!—to narrow down three options for improving one of the worst traffic bottlenecks in the country to two.

Richard Burden: My hon. Friend makes an important point that will be repeated in the other place and if the Bill gets to Committee, and we will be seeking a much more robust regulatory environment. My hon. Friend the Member for Ellesmere Port and Neston (Andrew Miller) said that securing public confidence is not just important to us as parliamentarians when representing our constituents, but it is also important to the industry, which needs public concern about this issue like a hole in the head. If questions are to be answered they should be answered, and we should have transparency and a proper regulatory regime.

Stephen Williams: This has been a wide-ranging debate, which is entirely appropriate for a very wide-ranging Bill that spans three Departments and several Government agencies. Between us on the Front Benches we have heard from 25 colleagues, so I hope the House will understand that I cannot respond to every point raised in the time I have available. I will focus on the main points that have been raised on roads, zero-carbon homes and the energy provisions.
	On reform to our national road network, the upkeep of our road network is vital for the economy. That is why the Government are investing more than £6 billion in this Parliament, and £12 billion in the next, on highways maintenance for strategic and local roads—enough to resurface 80% of the national road network and fill 19 million potholes a year on local roads. One of the provisions is to convert the Highways Agency into a company that is wholly owned by the Government. Contrary to several observations that have been made, for example by the hon. Members for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) and for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), there is absolutely no intention that the new highways company will be privatised. In response to the question put by the hon. Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods), that applies to the Land Registry, too. The reforms to the Land Registry are necessary to bring local land registry into the 21st century and digitise 348 card indexes around the country. There is absolutely no intention to fatten up either company for privatisation.